Texturing the Cerberus

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Graham Kennedy
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Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Graham Kennedy »

This one turned out to be waaay harder to texture. For one, I had to basically rebuild almost the whole model from scratch. The way you texture something is to use a process called "unwrapping" to spread the model's surface out flat over an image. But unwrapping works best on objects that are nice and clean - cylinders, spheres, cubes, etc. The primary hull is a distorted sphere, so that works okay... until you cut holes in it for windows, airlocks, etc. If you try to unwrap it after that, blender can go a bit crazy and give you weird distorted shapes that make the hull texture look very odd. So I had to rebuild the primary hull, the engineering hull, and the nacelle struts. Oddly, it textured the nacelles themselves just fine.

Before and afters...

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On the original design the escape pod hatch covers are barely visible, though they are there. Now they're textured and numbered.

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Funny, I showed this to T'Pau yesterday and the first thing she said was "Oh, it's called Cerberus because it had three heads, and the ship has three nacelles?" And in all the time I've spent working on this ship, that thought had never once crossed my mind! But it's so obvious once you think of it.

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Another thing that made this a far more difficult job to texture is that it's not just the main ship - I had to create a shuttlecraft from scratch and texture that, too. One great thing about textures - I find them fiddly to set up, but once they are set up they can make life really easy. On my old shuttle design I created the hull lettering by literally creating the text as a 3D object in blender, then putting that so it intersected the hull. Then I used a function called a boolean, which chops off all the parts of the text that are sticking out. Hey presto, you have text that matches the hull surface. It's fiddly and takes an insanely long time - there are cases where I had to repeat that process one letter at a time, to make the text fit the curvature on a hull!

Now I have a textured shuttle, however, all I have to do to make another one is go back to the texture image in photoshop, change the text, and save it as a new texture. So now that the hard work of setting up the texture is done, I can make new shuttles in minutes.

Cerberus has up to three shuttles. In keeping with the doggie theme I've called two of them Little Pup and Underdog. Any suggestions for the third?

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Not only did I have to make a whole new shuttle for this, I also had to make a whole new travel pod. It looks a little too tall for my liking, though... I think maybe I need to raise the floor about six inches.

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The bridge. Easily the most complex of the interior rooms - most are just a box with a light source, maybe a table and chairs. For the bridge I had to create the room, a captain's chair, and no less than eighteen different console images to put onto the various consoles. Again, a time consuming process but once I have a bank of console images made up, I can put them onto any console in any model very easily.
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Bryan Moore
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Bryan Moore »

Love this ship - although it seems a bit "chubby" compared to most Star Fleet Ships. These textures look great, and I like that it's likely a pretty cramped, spartan ship.

Perhaps "Droopy" for your 3rd shuttle? Not sure if Droopy the Dog cartoons made it across the pond, but I fondly remember them growing up here.
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Chubby is a good description, and yes that was on purpose.

I like droopy. Considered Snoopy too... though in the ‘broken down hard luck case’ tradition, I also thought about Old Yeller.

Or maybe Cujo...
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Mikey »

The travel pod may look too tall to your eye because you recall them not having any seats, so all the passengers would be at full height. Instead of raising the floor, you could just call it the luxury model...

The texture really adds to the gestalt of the image in a way that seems more than just the enhancement of the picture. Even though it is still obviously a CGI on my screen, there is a subtext of realism that isn't present in the original "untextured" images.

As far as the name of the third shuttle, how about a nod to one of the other great classic SF shows of all time... K-9!
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Those two are standing, though, not sitting!

From what I've found online, the exterior dimensions of a pod are such that it's much taller than a person - 8.6 feet tall according to that image, and you can see how high the person beside it looks. Yet Kirk stands with his head far closer to the ceiling than that figure does :

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So... either the pod is about a foot or so shorter than the online diagrams suggest. Or Kirk is like seven feet tall. Or there's 6-12 inches of stuff under the floor, which raises it significantly. And that would make sense, since there's artificial gravity plating and such to be under there.

And love K-9 as a shuttle name. Also thought of Scooby or Snoopy... or Muffit. So many choices...
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by IanKennedy »

What about "Mutley" or "Gnasher"
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Man, now I want to make it some giant fanwank ship with a giant shuttlebay and like fifty doggie shuttles... :)
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by IanKennedy »

One nit. Your pictures of Underdog and Little pup show that they both have the same /2 registration number:
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

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Hong Kong Phooey!
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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Graham Kennedy »

And now they don't. A good example of how easy textures can make things - just alter the 2 to a 1 on the texture image in photoshop, save the image, reload the image in blender, and re-render the scene. Less than 10 minutes total.

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Re: Texturing the Cerberus

Post by Mikey »

IanKennedy wrote:Hong Kong Phooey!
TBF, he is the #1 super guy...
I can't stand nothing dull
I got the high gloss luster
I'll massacre your ass as fast
as Bull offed Custer
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